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Hezbollah brings murder to Robbins, NC

July 21, 2006

By John Myers, Internet Photojournalist

    I was the managing editor of a now-defunct weekly newspaper, The Robbins Record in Robbins, NC, one Wednesday morning in 1983 when Hezbollah terrorists came on a murderous visit.
     Wednesday is press day in the weekly newspaper business and I had stayed up late Tuesday night, as always, getting all but finishing touches done on the weekly edition.
     When I came in to work early Wednesday morning, I anticipated a few last-minute details to “put the newspaper to bed,” as it is called in the journalism world, then a drive down to the head office in Aberdeen, NC, where the paper was to be printed at 10 a.m.
     But events during the night on the other side of the planet intervened.
     Hezbollah terrorists in Lebanon had pulled off the bloody suicide bombing that destroyed the Marine barracks in Beirut on Oct. 23, 1983, costing 241 American lives.
     I had heard about it on the morning news, but never expected it would impact Robbins, a sleepy little two-stoplight community in northern Moore County, NC.

Beirut visits Robbins

     My co-worker Charlene arrived a few minutes late shortly after 8 a.m. all in a tizzy. She had heard via the grapevine that a parent in our community had a son who was one of the Marines assigned to Lebanon in that hellhole we had sent our troops to “monitor.”
     Until that awful morning, like most Americans I had paid scant attention to President Ronald Reagan’s commitment of troops in an attempt to bring peace to war-torn Lebanon.
     Charlene, bless her heart, had recognized the newsworthiness of the local angle to the story immediately and had gone to visit the father of the Marine in Beirut. She had brought with her letters and photos the Marine had sent to his father about Beirut.
     I quickly read through the letters and saw the treasure trove of news handed to us on a platter, a ground-level view of what that Marine’s duty was like in that foreign locale.

Beirut Marine writes home

     The Marine told how he and his buddies were forbidden to get involved in the fighting between various factions warring for control of Lebanon, but were instead confined to a small garrison where Hezbollah terrorists daily rained mortars and rockets.
     If by some miracle, they could identify where fire was coming from, they could return fire, but even then, they were handcuffed by ridiculous rules of engagement that were designed to protect “innocent civilians.” And the terrorists hid behind those “innocent civilians” while they were firing on the Marines, so all the Marines could do was hunker down and take the daily, sometimes hourly, death and destruction raining down on them.
     Once in a great while, they would identify a target they could shoot at, such as a Hezbollah rocket launch site, and then the Marine artillery could respond. And even more rarely, they would identify a target they could hit with the Navy ships just offshore.
     I read with particular interest the Marine’s account about gunfire support from the battleship USS New Jersey, who on rare occasions got to open up with her 16-inch guns and blast to smithereens a few Hezbollah terrorists.
     I saw the Jersey in action outside DaNang harbor in ’69 in the Vietnam War and she was awesome. But most of the time, the Marine wrote, he and his buddies just hunkered down and took it, cursing the idiots who sent them to that hellhole to serve as target practice for Hezbollah.

Hezbollah tactics unchanged

    Sound familiar? Déjà vu all over again, as Yogi Berra would say.
     Fast forward to today with some of those same Hezbollah terrorists – or their sons – still raining death and destruction from southern Lebanon into Israel, while the Israeli army tries once again to dislodge them from the northern border of the Jewish nation. And these same cowardly terrorists are still hiding behind the "innocent civilians" of Lebanon.
    If you think the United States has no dog in that fight, you’ve got a mighty short memory or you’ve been hiding in a deep, dark hole (or you’re a left-wing liberal nut).
     Israel is trying to finish the job our Marines weren’t allowed to do in 1983. Those same Hezbollah terrorists who murdered 241 of our Marines in ’83 are still doing the same thing today. Only difference is they’re murdering Israeli civilians instead of our Marines. I’m praying daily for those Israeli soldiers putting their lives on the line to literally fight the good fight against the Islamo-Nazis in this particular theater of the worldwide war on terror.
     But I digress. Back to that Wednesday morning in 1983.
     I tore up the front page layout I had spent so many hours on Tuesday night and started over. First, I quickly pounded out a story, quoting the Marine’s letters from Beirut, then wrote the headline and sized a couple of the photos of him and his Marine buddies at war.
     I quickly finished up a hasty layout and rushed out the door to make the trip to Aberdeen to get the paper printed, only a few minutes late for my pressrun schedule.

A father's fears realized

     But when I got to Aberdeen, I had an urgent message to call Charlene. When I did, she had the worst news.
     The Marine’s father had just gotten a phone call from the Marines. His son was one of the 241 killed when Hezbollah terrorists drove a truck-full of explosives into the front door of the Marine barracks.
     No time to rewrite the story before press-time. I added a box just below the big banner headline with the late update, explaining that the Marine quoted in the story was dead. With my hastily revised layout, the paper was rushed to the press for printing.
     It was one of the most quickly written stories I ever did and the layout was even quicker. No time for reflection, just get it done so the paper wouldn’t be printed late.
     But my slap-dash reporting won a N.C. Press Association award that year for newswriting. It really wasn’t my writing that won the award; it was the timeliness of the situation, making a faraway conflict real to the local readers, bringing Beirut to Robbins.

Last letter home

     The grieving father added one postscript to the story. A week or so after the massacre, he called the news office again. He had a letter from his deceased son in his mailbox and he couldn’t bear to take it out of the box. Obviously, it was written before the massacre.
     Charlene again did the legwork, driving out to the man’s house and getting the letter for him. After he mustered up the courage to read it, he lent it to her for publication.
     The deceased Marine wrote his dad about his hopes and fears as previously, adding that he was really looking forward to getting out of that quagmire soon and coming home.

Reagan's folly

    I’m still a Reagan man all the way, but RR should have never gotten us into that Lebanon mess that turned out to be yet another failed attempt at “nation building.”
     I hope we learned a lesson from that fiasco to never send our forces into harm’s way with one or both arms tied behind their backs. All that does is set them up for a massacre.
     Obviously Bill Clinton learned nothing from Lebanon when he repeated Reagan’s mistake by doing essentially the same thing with our troops in Somalia a decade later, setting up the infamous “Black Hawk Down” incident with our valiant Delta warriors.
     President Bush has so far proven himself wiser than Reagan at least in the comparison of Beirut to Baghdad. I pray he will continue to show the resolve to back our troops all the way until the job is done, in Baghdad, Beirut, Iran, Syria and North Korea, too.
     Of course, the battle in all those locales will almost certainly continue long after W has completed his second term and on into the first term of Hillary (God forbid) or McCain or Rudi or whichever Republican should ride in on a dark horse to vanquish the second coming of Bill, or shall we say Billary?
     Much is unclear about the future of this republic, but at least one thing is eminently clear for those with even one eye. We know who our enemies are, and it ain’t Israel.

(John Myers is a former newspaper editor, reporter and photojournalist)